The is an online

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

and text corpus of the

Egyptian language The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (; ), is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world ...

developed by the Research Centre for Primary Sources of the Ancient World at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. Intended to be a complete documentation of the Egyptian lexicon, it encompasses varied meanings of words in different texts over 3000 years of linguistic history. The dictionary is entirely based on

primary source In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an Artifact (archaeology), artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was cre ...

material, including inscriptions from temple walls, roads, tombs, papyri, and potsherds from religious, legal, administrative, and literary texts. The ' is publicly available on the internet. It is a publication of two academy's projects at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

History

The is modelled and built upon the '' Wörterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache'' (English: ''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language'') begun by Adolf Erman in 1897 at the

Prussian Academy of Sciences The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences () was an academy established in Berlin, Germany on 11 July 1700, four years after the Prussian Academy of Arts, or "Arts Academy," to which "Berlin Academy" may also refer. In the 18th century, when Frenc ...

. His novel approach was to first create a comprehensive index of all

materials then available, rather than to start a dictionary on selected excerpts. This method built an Ancient Egyptian lexicography that is still important today. Between 1897–1940, with the participation of more than 80 domestic and foreign Egyptologists, the majority of known Egyptian texts was recorded and archived. The original ''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language'' (13 volumes, Leipzig-Berlin) appeared between 1926 and 1931, with revised editions until 1963. Other notable Egyptologists who contributed to the dictionary include Kurt Heinrich Sethe (1869–1934) and Hermann Grapow (1885–1967). At over 16,000 entries and over 1.5 million words, this monumental work remains the largest printed dictionary of Ancient Egyptian in existence. By 1940 work on the '' Wörterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache'' was largely complete and work concentrated on research of the word files and indexes over the next 50 years. Since then, the amount of known texts discovered in pharaonic Egypt more than doubled and neither the dictionary nor the text files it was built upon represented the current state of research. The resumption of work on a new ancient Egyptian dictionary therefore became a priority among international Egyptologists. In 1993, a project to update the dictionary began at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and created the '.Stephan J. Seidlmayer: Brochure on the
online
. Berlin: Heckmann-Wentzel-Stiftung, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, 1999

External links

* ''TLA'' v2.x (since 2022): https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de. * ''TLA'' v1.x (since 2004, last update 2014): https://aaew.bbaw.de/tla.

information page. * Acacemy's project page: https://aaew.bbaw.de.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Altagyptisches Worterbuch German dictionaries Egyptian dictionaries